The October status report brought a general preview about an incoming balance package that affects almost all robots in the game.

After some public testing, forum feedback, collecting tears, and more number juggling, we now present you the final details.

The main goals of this balancing package are:

• Boost light and assault robots considerably.
• More diverse robot bonuses, but they generally provide less value increase. This also lessens the gap between high-level veteran players and less fortunate newbies.
• Push robots more towards their intended roles.

Colorful spreadsheets coming up.

We're also introducing 3 new extensions under the Robot control category:

• Combat robot specialist - Required extension for all combat robots, and controls the combat role bonuses.
• Industrial robot specialist - Required extension for all industrial robots, and controls the industrial role bonuses.
• Hi-tech robot specialist - Required extension for all Mk2 robots, and controls the special Mk2 bonuses.

The combat and industrial robot specialist extensions are becoming starter extensions, thus every existing character will receive these two on level 1 during the patch.

Additional notes

• The effect of the mass gain of light robots may not be clear for everyone: increased base mass for robots lessens the speed reduction effect of equipped modules.
• We cleaned up some parameters of prototype robots, this means either slight increases or reductions. Compared to normal robots, light/assault prototypes now have +5 CPU/reactor and +10 sensor strength, while mechs/heavy mechs have +10 CPU/reactor/sensor strength.
• Mk2 robots retain their special extra bonuses (so they still have one additional bonus compared to standard bots), but these are now controlled by a new extension.
• The Baphomet loses its lone missile slot, as a consequence we'll remove all modules and ammo from this slot in all existing Baphomets and place them back into the same storage during the patch.
• Although the Waspish gains a second small/medium mixed missile slot to bring it in line with the other two assaults, to make it look badass these have to be on its sides. So instead the top/back slot will lose the medium fitting and as such we'll also remove any equipped module from this slot during the patch.
• Do note that assaults received a considerable reactor boost to make room for those medium modules.

The patch itself will be deployed to the live server today at 14:00 CET/server time. We'll be also performing some server and database maintenance, so the estimated downtime will be about 2 hours.

ps. This isn't the monthly report, that's still coming.